Olympic athletes wear special competition clothing to gain an edge in their sport. Science & technology continues to improve the clothes and protective gear they wear.
In the bobsled, downhill racing and speed skating, athletes want to go faster. How do they do it? Hard work, physical training, the right equipment and fast clothes made of special aerodynamic material all contribute. Clothes are engineered to enhance performance and reduce drag.
All Olympic suits start in the lab with synthetic polymer materials and molecules called monomers. Engineers string the monomers together to make polymers. A long polymer chain is strong.
Chemical engineers decide which monomers to use and how to connect them to make different materials for different uses. Spandex is lightweight and flexible for suits while Kevlar is strong yet lightweight for skis and helmets.
Even wind resistance can be engineered into a clothing design. Sometimes, a rougher surface can have less drag than a smooth surface helping an athlete go faster. Golf balls are designed with dimples to go farther. The dimples create whirlpools or tiny vortexes of air
It might not be as obvious as physics or materials engineering, but math from arithmetic to calculus can describe every move the athletes make from jumps to spins on the snow and ice.
Math counts in the Olympics. There are 2,500 athletes competing in 86 sports and events to win 252 medals at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. But these are only the base numbers in the games.
Math is all around in scores and measurements, motion and quantities. It can be as easy as how many hockey players are on the ice? Or how many times has the puck gone into the net?
Scoring in ice skating involves arithmetic. Addition is only part of the scoring. Each element is assigned points and then is judged on how well it is performed. A triple axle is worth three points, but the judges will also rate the overall performance and artistry of the skater.
Nine judges give scores, but only five of the scores will count. Two of the scores are thrown out at random, then the highest and lowest
Curling became an Olympic sport in 1998. It’s an unusual sport to many.
The sport involves one player thrusting a huge “rock” or stone down a sheet of ice. Two other players sweep a path, guiding the rock to the center of the target called the “house.” At the end of play, the team with the most rocks near the center of the house is the winner.
Getting a curling stone from the start to the house is all physics. Force and friction is what makes it all work.
It all starts with a push out of a “hack.” The curler positions their foot to push out of the hack with a lot of force to accelerate with the curling rock. The curler’s force is then transferred to the rock.
Then the sweepers take over. The brush they use is made from a synthetic material that has a little abrasiveness. The objective of sweeping is to make the rock go farther and very slightly alter the rock’s path.
When curling began and was a sport outside, the brushes
Flying down a ramp at speeds over 60 miles per hour, jumping off the edge, gliding through the air and then landing two football fields away is what Olympic ski jumpers do everyday.
Ski jumping requires a complex manipulation of forces – gravity, drag and lift.
A ski jumper has two contradictory missions with two very different positions. One is to get down the ramp or inrun as fast as possible, gaining maximum speed. The second is to takeoff into the air and fly as far as possible.
As a ski jumper hurdles down the inrun, they try to gain speed. The air around them creates resistance. To minimize the drag, a skier needs to be in a streamlined position – chest parallel to the snow, head down and arms back.
When the skier reaches take off, their body needs to readjust and change position. In a tenth of a second, the skier straightens upward and leans forward to maximize lift. Once in the air, the skier isn’t concerned with drag, but is instead working to use the air to lift
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Every four years, the stakes get higher for figure skaters at the Olympics as they try to increase rotation in the air with their triple axels and quadruple toe loops. Figure skating is one of the most demanding sports at the Olympics.
It is a complicated skill with a lot of different motions. Skaters need to optimize a lot of different conditions – speed, force, vertical velocity and angular momentum. All with exact timing.
Angular momentum is an important piece of jumping in skating. It determines how fast a skater can rotate. The more angular momentum, the higher the potential to spin.
Skaters generate angular momentum by pushing off the ice with their skates.
Pushing off the ice also generates vertical velocity. Vertical velocity gets a skater high enough in the air to do the spin by producing forces from the jump during takeoff.
What happens is an action and a reaction. As the leg muscles contract and the leg pushes down against the ice, the ice creates a force that pushes back on the legs, creating vertical velocity. The more velocity a
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